An artist learning her craft.

Anubis in Ink

This week, having been incredibly inspired by the wonderful art produced by the children at school, I had a go at drawing the ancient Egyptian god, Anubis. (We are studying the Ancient Egyptians in Year 3.)

I started with a basic sketch of the main shapes…

Then I improved my sketch, making it more detailed and trying out different shapes and patterns…

Once I had all of the main ideas in my head I drew over my pencil in ink and then removed all of the pencil with a putty eraser to make an outline drawing…

At this stage I decided to get rid of the eyebrow as it detracted from the traditional ancient Egyptian eye shape. My next job was to fill in all of the solid black areas. I like to do this for the whole drawing as solid black has a strong effect on the final balance of the picture, so if I do it all at once I can feel something of how it will turn out. Here’s the drawing with the solid black areas added…

You can see where I used different inks. The detail and outer edges of each area were done with my trusty Pigma Microns but I used my Pentel Brush Pen to fill in larger areas. You can’t see the difference by eye but the scanner picks it up. Finally I worked on the details and textures to create my finished drawing…